What do think should be included on the home page of your church website?  How should it be displayed?  What options for connection should be most obvious?  What are your goals when setting up your home page? How effective is your home page?  How do you measure it's effectiveness?  Check out what the folks at East Valley Nazarene have done with their homepage.  It's simple and beautiful and I think you are going to love it.

Aliso Creek Presbyterian Church has put together a custom church website using the SnapShot Web tools.  One thing that you'll notice as you click through their church website is that they have some amazing and powerful photographs on every page.  These aren't your typical stock photos of generic smiling families.  Instead, they hired a local photographer to come out to their church and take some shots of people in their community.

The effect of a few good photos for your church website is priceless.  Take a look at www.acpc.net and let us know what you think.

The good folks at Trinity United Methodist Church in Elkhart, IN have had a SnapShot Website for their church for the last 5 years.  Just this past month though, they decided it was time for a major redesign of this church website. Since they are using the SnapShot tools to manage their site, the entire redisign process took only a matter of hours as they switched to a different template, make a few custom changes to the new template, then clicked through each page of their site to make sure everything was in place.

Check out the new look and feel at www.3umc.org.

We recently interviewed Justin Davis, the Student Pastor and the Pastor's assistant at The Pentecostals of Pasadena about their new church website - www.thepopchurch.org.

Here are some of the highlights from the interview:

SnapShot Web: Tell us a little about The Pentecostals of Pasadena.

Justin Davis: Our church has been in Pasadena for 58 years.  In September 2008 our church was severely damaged during hurricane Ike, and we were displaced for 2 ½ years.  Several months ago we finally made it back home to our church building. Everything is new and improved, and we felt like our website needed to be new and improved as well.

SSW: We've seen the new site.  It looks awesome.  How much time do you spend working on your website each week? What changes do you make regularly?

JD: Time spent updating the site every week is a minimum, maybe 3 hours.  And that includes updating our podcast with our latest services on Monday and Thursday.  I also make any changes to the calendar that are needed.

SSW: What kind of feedback have you received from people in your church or community?

JD: Feedback from our church was been great.  The Sermon Archive is particularly popular, especially during a sermon series where you want to catch every message.  They also love having the church calendar online. We pass out year long calendars at the beginning of the year.  But, as always happens dates/times get changed, new events are planned.  With the online calendar it is being updated weekly and everyone is aware of upcoming events.

SSW: Now that you have worked with the SnapShot Tools a bit, If you could share one or two tips or tricks with others who are new to  the SnapShot Web world, what would they be?  

JD: Two words:  Recurring Events.  The initial setup of the calendar was time consuming, but every month got easier, due to the recurring events already being populated.  Also, I spent quite a bit of time reviewing the tutorials that are available.

SSW: Has this been a solo endeaver of have you gotten others involved in the website (either through editing the site or interacting in some other way)?

JD: We have a graphic artist in the church who supplied the slides for our home page slide show.  She keeps them updated with our upcoming events.

SSW: Anything else you'd like to say?

JD: I am extremely impressed with Snapshot Web, the product and the people.  Because they specialize in church websites, they had a module created for everything we wanted.  And most of it came pre-loaded on the site, we just had to edit it.  I have made several calls to them and they spent time to walk me through different questions I had, and made some changes to the site for me. This is their business, but it seems they are approaching it with the heart of ministry.

SSW: What do we owe you for that last statment and where can we send the check.  Just Kidding.  Thanks for the kind words.

The fine folks at Yorba Linda Friends Church recently launched a custom SnapShot Website.  When the new site launched, they put out a pretty great video to announce it.  They've done it again.  This time they have set up an amazing mobile app for Apple, Android, and Blackberry through the R04R promo.  You can check out the mobile app at friendschurchyl.com/mobile.

Just like last time, they put together a slick video to announce the app to their community and the world.

Want to setup a mobile presence for your church?  Sign up today.

You know your Church Website needs help if It's May and you are still promoting your Christmas Services from last year.

It's not often that you find a church website that's this outdated.  Chirstmas in May?  But it's far too common to see church websites that are several weeks behind.  

A friend emailed me today to let me know about a church wesite that he wanted me to see.  He was really impressed with design.  When I went to the site, the first thing I noticed on the home page was a big heading with the words - Latest News - We'll be meeting at __________ Park on April 3rd.  I'm assuming they are not yet announcing April 3rd, 2012.  This means that their home page is screaming in big, bold letters "I HAVEN'T BEEN UPDATED IN OVER A MONTH."

I always tell people that if they aren't able to commit to update their church website at least weekly, then don't put any dated material on it.  

Know any church websites that need help? Let us know. We'll be having our second annual "Please Help My Church Website Contest" starting next week.

Friends Church in Yorba Linda just launched a new church website with the help of the SnapShot Web team.  As the new site went live, they put together a quick video to show at their services and online to let people know about the launch and new domain name.  It's a simple and clear 30 second video to point you to friendschurchyl.com.  Check it out.

What have you done to let people know about your church website?